Currently, retail displays that house promotional items, such as branded end cap or end stand displays, free-standing promotional displays, pallets, etc., are allocated to retail stores using methods that require significant manual interaction or configuration. That is, employees of a retail company must manually evaluate proposed displays, determine which displays to allocate to stores, determine which stores are to receive certain types of displays, etc. This process itself is time intensive and costly. However, in addition, this type of manual allocation frequently produces non-ideal solutions in that the displays are allocated to stores that cannot sell through the promotional items housed in the displays or that do not have available spaces for the displays. Displays are costly and bulky and, thus, a non-ideal allocation of display can result is significant financial losses.
Some retailers may attempt to solve this problem by grouping stores into categories and allocating displays via the categories. For example, retailers may allocate certain displays to stores having a known store configuration or layout, to segmented departments of a store, etc. However, this type of allocation may still result in allocations to stores that cannot sell through the promotional items housed in the displays or that do not have available spaces for the displays. Moreover, this type of allocation does not take in account any overall profit, sell through, or margin resulting from the allocation of displays.